You've got to stand for something or you're going to fall for anything

Innie Once More

The term “Innie” has been used amongst my colleagues to refer to an Information Architect that works inside a large organization. At the Information Architecture Summit in Phoenix this April, Dan Willis and Mags Hanley paid tribute to this concept (Innies vs Outies, a UX Death Match). I’m invoking the term here to refer to my new career adventure.

At the beginning of October, I joined the User Experience group at Oracle. A few weeks in and already I can see opportunities to contribute to this team to drive high quality interaction for all the constituents that need to interact with Oracle online. This is a pretty big task. However, I’ve been in this situation before and it’s exactly the kind of challenge that I find incredibly rewarding. I like big, gnarly, complex communication requirements. I like the set of challenges that come with “making the complex clear”. I’ve really been enjoying digging in.

As something begins it implies something has ended. In taking my new gig I had to leave my EightShapes colleagues. I’ve worked with them for many years. I met Nathan at an IA Summit based on conversations there we asked him to build a documentation system for the company I was working for at the time, Sun Microsystems. That was just the beginning of many projects.

As an employee and contractor with EightShapes, I was a trusted partner in the work I completed for clients. I learned a great deal working for and with Dan, Nathan, Dimple, Jason, John, Chris, Izac, PJ, James, José, David, Debbie, France, Anna, Geoff and our lovely and collaborative clients. I think they should know I appreciate it. 🙂

It’s been three years on the ‘Outside’. The skills I sharpened and the great projects I got to work on while consulting definitely gave me insight that I’ve been calling on in my current role. So, here’s to making the complex clear inside the organization.